


a generic college roommate love story

by awkwardspaceturtle



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Awkward Conversations, Eddie Kaspbrak & Richie Tozier Bickering, Fluff and Crack, Friends to Lovers, Friendship, Friendship/Love, Implied Hanbrough, M/M, Porn Watching, established benverly
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-03
Updated: 2019-11-05
Packaged: 2021-01-21 06:22:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,590
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21294962
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/awkwardspaceturtle/pseuds/awkwardspaceturtle
Summary: Based on that post in which the "straight" OP who's rooming with a gay guy is questioning himself if he's being homophobic hating on his roomie's boyfriends; turns out he'd been in love with him all along. In this fic, one is oblivious, one is protecting himself from the truth he obviously knows, and both are idiots in love.(More tags to add later as the story drags the poor author through mud and grime; the author has zero control on this train wreck, the story owns her and marches on in its own drum while making the author dance along its beat.)
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak & Richie Tozier, Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier, Minor Ben Hanscom/Beverly Marsh - Relationship
Comments: 18
Kudos: 48





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> so I haven't been alright since watching IT Chapter 2, and thinking about reddie being happy and both alive is the only thing keeping me sane.
> 
> i've been writing this on-and-off for a couple of weeks already, a loose plot in my head and my motivation playing a disappearing act every now and then, and i keep editing like at least thrice, so bless you if you could bear with me. also, totally random, but a bleeding eddie casually dropping a nonchalant "boweerssss iss in my rooomm" is still sending me to this day

He had seen all manner of gruesome and frightful things in his childhood, both while awake and even in dreams, that he figured he had already met his lifetime quota of traumatic events that should have left him desensitized to pretty much everything -- but here he was once again, all mobility stolen due to shock, brain cells desperate to make sense of what his eyes are telling him he’s seeing, coffee mug half-raised to his open mouth, and a trashbag threatening to drop from his suddenly weak fingers--

_flump_ \- welp, at least it wasn’t his coffee -- oh, okay, _that’s_ dripping to his bare feet now, so there goes his morning life sustenance.

To his right, a half-lidded Richie Tozier has just disentangled himself from this week’s chosen-by-the-devil, lean and muscular with a golden mane and a hand on Richie’s bum, who after getting caught making out in the dormitory hallway at six in the morning didn’t even think twice of once again bashing his annoying face against Richie’s mouth.

And of course Richie purred and bucked his hips, because why wouldn’t he, when he knows he’s such a big catch so it’s all the more exciting to be a fucking tease.

“Get lost, stupid,”’ Richie says with a sleep-trodden chuckle when _Blonde and Unfairly Perfect and Well Endowed _finally runs off to return to the depths of hell from whence he came.

Standing awkwardly in his three-day shirt and pineapple boxers, Eddie feels like a slice of ham all forgotten and unimportant in the face of this picturesque clandestine goodbye.

“Did you wade in the sewer or something,” Richie says with a yawn as he glances at the puddle by Eddie’s feet, before walking inside their room without addressing what just happened, because after all why should it bother Eddie now that they’ve known each other since they were kids? --now that they’ve been rooming together for a year ever since leaving Derry for college? --now that it’s already common knowledge that Richie likes boys?

Still, he can be allowed to worry about his best friend.

“So you were out all night doing _that_?” Eddie says as he follows Richie into their room. “You know, I think that was the dude who Stan swears stole his favorite pen just to mess with him, and I cannot believe that you would ever commit this betrayal of friendship by getting into that guy’s pants--”

“Hey, hey, keep it down,” Richie says as he dives in to pinch Eddie’s cheek. “Keep this up every morning, and people are going to think we’re married.”

“We’d have to be, otherwise we wouldn’t survive a day together,” Eddie says with an exaggerated roll of his eyes as he swats Richie’s hand away (but of course he proceeds to help his very sleepy roommate out of his coat, pants and shoes even while nagging him for getting into the wrong bed again, because who else will take care of him post-one-night-stand and make sure the alarm for his mid-afternoon class is set? Not that blonde beefcake, for sure.)

“Haven’t I warned you enough about staff infections?” Off one shoe.

Richie repeats his line to him, but in an exaggeratedly high pitch. “_Haven’t I warned you enough about staff infections?_ Like, all the damn time.”

“You do know the kind of _staff_ I’m talking about right? I’m being as explicit as I possibly can right now.” Off the other shoe.

“Yeah, I’m surprised you’ve got such a dirty mouth on that pretty-pretty face.”

“And could you stop taking condoms from my secret stash and buy your own? I might need those, you know.”

Richie pushes himself off from Eddie’s pillow, laughing as he struggles to get the words out. “Are you going to use them as balloons or something? Saving them as water containers for an apocalypse maybe?”

“Fuck does that mean?”

But Richie isn’t done laughing yet, not by a long shot. It takes him at least a full minute before he gets the words out.

“Portia asked me if you were shy about your ‘unfortunate small package’ -- hey, her words, not mine! -- and that’s why you wouldn’t have sex with her. Don’t worry, I said you were at least slightly average,” he manages to complete coherently in between laughs. “Sorry you still got dumped, though.” He didn’t look the slightest bit sorry at all.

“Okay, first of all, for fuck’s sake, _at least slightly average_, really?” Eddie says with his signature half-raised hand. “And second, I told her to wait ‘til I finished my Sex Pro’s and Con’s chart! There’s like a bazillion diseases that can be transmitted simply by kissing, do you not see the gravity of that? You _dick_.”

“Yeah, every time I share someone’s straw, my chances of living go down by 70%.”

“Not accurate, but exactly my point.”

“What, are you going to wait until three different medical examinations before you swap spit with anyone? You gotta live a little, virgin lips.”

“Hey, fuck you man.”

“Yeah, maybe after you finish your chart.” Richie retreats under the blanket with a wink. “Time for my prayer before bed. Dear Lord, please don’t let Eddie’s dick fall off before he’s thirty. (Eddie hits him with a Pikachu plushie) Amen. Goodnight, love you, Eds.”

“Yeah, yeah, love you too, asshole.” Eddie says. Other people had pointed it out to him early on that there was always something assuring about knowing that you’re straight because you can reach these levels of _Intense Hardcore Platonic Male Friendship_ with your gay best friend without things getting awkward for the both of you and creating a fissure in your relationship. As for Eddie personally, he honestly can’t remember who said it first, but between them and the rest of the Losers Club, saying “I love you” never sounded strange at all.

Still fuming about being called _slightly average_, Eddie retreats to the shower to make ridiculous impressions of Richie behind his back, and finds Richie snoring soundly by the time he’s done.

Tucked in and asleep under the covers, he almost looked a lot like the boy who used to help Eddie stealthily carry their blankets and pillows up on the roof of his childhood home to lie under the stars. Now that boy was taller, lean, had prettier eyelashes and a deeper voice, but armed with the same skill set of driving Eddie nuts. Maybe even improved upon, even.

With a sigh, Eddie walks around their small living quarters to clean up after the mess that hurricane Richie left. And a he bends down to pick up Richie’s discarded pants, he feels something hard and cylindrical tucked in its pocket. He puts his hand in, and pulls out the last thing he expected to find.

(and no, it’s not a small dildo)


	2. Chapter 2

“You got my pen back.” Wrapped in his airtight hug, Eddie believes Stanley Uris is probably the happiest person in a campus full of sleep-deprived college students right now. It was a indeed a stylish-looking pen with a couple of nightingales engraved around its lacquered barrel.

“How’d you get it?” Then, as if a switch flipped inside him, Stan’s glittery eyes suddenly turned dark. “You didn’t resort to anything drastic, did you?”

“My mom would break into fucking hives if I did anything even remotely drastic,” Eddie says matter-of-factly. “This was all Richie and the power of a good dicking.”

(Stan looks at the pen in his hand with an expression that begs “God I hope this wasn’t used in some weird sex act” if it could be translated into a smile.)

Hearing himself say that out loud, Eddie makes a face as he remembers the show he had first-row tickets to this morning. The image brings forth a constricting feeling in his chest, probably like what his first girlfriend felt when she told him her bra felt too tight and she wanted to take it off.

He studies the memory seared into his eyes. Not the bra-thing though, the Richie-thing. The guy was a little taller than Richie by a few inches, so that makes him out of Eddie’s comfortable fist range, although he might deal some insane damage if he jammed his fingers up the guy’s nose. For this, he’d need to wear surgical gloves for (1) avoiding mucous contamination, and (2) complete nasal penetration. This means he would have to always have a pair ready in his fanny pack in case he ran into the guy on campus, or purposefully study his daily routine to select the best time to ambush him when he least suspected it…

Wait, why is this even playing in his mind right now instead of his ex unclasping her bra? And isn’t assaulting a gay guy a hate crime? Doesn’t that make him… _h-h-homophobic_? No way. How, when he, a straight guy, is best friends and even rooming together with a gay guy? Fuck. The math just doesn’t add up.

“You alright, Eds?”

“Hm?”

“You look like a biochemical engineering major before final exams. Something wrong?”

“Stan, you’re pretty good at math, right?”

Stan looks like someone whose question just got answered by a totally unrelated question, that he also finds himself responding with another question. “Uh, I guess?”

“Okay, I kinda need to make sense of something.” Eddie draws a deep breath as he runs his fingers through his dark hair, which smells like Richie’s shampoo and conditioner today, because he wanted to get back at him for looting his secret stash. Not that it was the same thing, but Richie needed to be taught a lesson about taking other people’s stuff without permission, and that was the best Eddie can think of after rethinking his decision to raid Richie’s secret stash (which proved disappointing, because where he thought he’d find oily-naked-men porn, he found a worn photobook filled with their pictures instead. Which also struck him that it was pretty adorable of Richie to be that sentimental, and he decided not to mess with that.)

“Here goes,”’ Eddie finally says to an increasingly worried Stan. His words come out in a torrent, a dam of thoughts finally breaking and gushing out. “We’ve known each other for such a long time, right? And you can totally say I’m like the least homophobic person, right? And the least violent, I mean look at my hands, feel them, see? They’re so fucking soft like that, man, ‘cause I’ve never attacked anyone in my life. I mean, I kicked a clown, but that was my foot. But these hands? Soft as a newborn baby’s ass.”

For a quick second, a flash image of a younger Eddie rushing in after Beverly threw the first rock at Henry Bowers and bravely holding the front lines with her passes in Stan’s mind, but he nods anyway so that he would continue.

“But get this, (his voice drops to a whisper) I have a set of guys that I’ve developed an unreasonable… natural dislike for. Like I can’t even explain, but I get this really stuffy feeling in my chest when I see them in certain circumstances. Sometimes it comes to a point where I’d like to I dunno, slap them or something? And they’re all gay, or at least definitely not straight.”

“... And you’re certain they’re collectively not straight because…?”

“Because they have all hung around Rich getting all sexy-like and shit.”

_Oh, so we’re finally having this conversation_, Stan thinks, although it didn’t begin the way he thought it would. Still, he can’t believe Eddie could be this thick to not even hear himself stating the facts to his face.

“Maybe that’s just me being lowkey over-protective of Rich, right?” Eddie drones on, completely immersed in his monologue. “Because I don’t really think I hate guys who like other guys. Hell, who anyone likes isn’t even any of my business. I mean I don’t hate Richie, and I swear I totally was the supportive best friend when he came out to me.”

For this reaction, Stan channels his inner Squidward. “You mean when you assured him nothing was going to change between you two and that you’d be, and I quote, friends forever?”

“Exactly. Couldn’t understand why Rich looked down when I said that though… Oh, right, because it meant a lifetime of voided I-fucked-your-mom jokes.”

“Uhuh, I’m sure that was the case,” Stanley says in the manner of someone who knew that wasn’t exactly the case. 

“But not hating one guy doesn’t mean I’m automatically qualified as not homophobic, I guess.” Eddie says, looking thoughtful. “I mean, it’s a given that I wouldn’t hate my best friend _because_ he’s my best friend. Sure I get mad when he sleeps on my bed or when he accidentally borrows my shirts, but I’ve never felt the urge to bitch-slap him.”

“Have you ever, I dunno, maybe, considered the fact that you’re only feeling this way when they’re ‘hanging around Richie getting all sexy-like and shit’?”

“Damn, Stanley, you kiss your mother with that mouth?”

Stan’s no-bullshit stare only intensifies, forcing Eddie to stop deflecting and to face the facts. In a TV show or a movie, this is the moment when the camera zooms in on the main character whose eyes just would light up on cue as they reach a plot-altering epiphany.

“Shit, Stanley, you’re right.” Eddie says.

“I am?”

“Yeah, I’m fucking seeing the light here.”

Stan is actually surprised, but skeptical. “You are?”

“Yes. Totally. I understand what you’re trying to tell me.”

Stan grows increasingly less excited. “You do?”

“Yeah. My head’s never been clearer.” Eddie keeps on slowly nodding to himself, a bobbing-head dog ornament popular among car owners. His face clenches as if he’s about to reveal the epiphany that’s going to make everything fall into their rightful place. The metaphorical camera zooms in closer, Stanely’s adam’s apple bobs in anticipation.

“There’s one thing I can do to prove to myself that I’m not homophobic.”

“Wait, what?” Stan shakes his head.

Eddie’s voice drops even lower. “It’s time to watch some gay porn.” And with that, he storms off with purpose in his red Chuck Taylors, the main character off to carve his own path at last. Left standing in his wake as the dust settles is his friend looking even more dumbfounded than before.

“Don’t we have Philo together in like five minutes?” Stan calls after him, which immediately makes Eddie do a 180-degree twirl-like maneuver on his feet.

“Yep, can’t risk missing class or else I won’t reach my target GPA and ruin my chances of getting a good job and securing a good future in which I live longer than my good ole Uncle Pete.”

And that’s how Eddie spent the next hour and a half (and a couple more periods of majors after that) trying not to google porn in class.


	3. Chapter 3

“Fuck, why didn’t I just ask Mike and Bill to make out in front of me or something? Right, ‘cause I’m not a creep,” Eddie tells himself in the dark as he settles in between the cold porcelain of the bathtub (it was a pretty generous dormitory) with his laptop nestled on his folded legs and two impossibly gorgeous adult men on the screen.

Like an amateur, he had typed “gayporn . com” on the search bar and had to restart all over again cause he forgot to go incognito and therefore needed to delete history.

He checks his watch; Richie should still be asleep as he still had a couple of hours left until his classes start for the day. True enough, he can hear him snoring through the bathroom door. In fact, Richie was snoring louder than the men were flirting, because it has been five minutes into this half-hour long video and Eddie hasn’t heard a fucking thing. Either the speakers were busted, or the video itself lacked any audio, but it had a 96% approval rating so the yummy parts should be promising. Conveniently, Eddie is also well-versed in lip-reading, so there’s that.

Man #1 is a gorgeous boy-next-door kind of stud manning a hotdog stand in a carnival by the beach. Man #2 is a hot dark-haired Eros looking all buff and out of place in the carnival and is the only customer craving hotdogs for some reason despite all the extras hired to blend into the background. Obviously sparks are flying between the two, and Eddie’s pretty sure he’s missing out on all the innuendos being thrown over these sizzling wieners, but then Wiener Boy is too distracted that he squeezes the mustard too hard it squirts all over Buff Guy’s too-tight pineapple-patterned shirt. A full minute of tissue-dabbing and tit-feeling and sensual moaning ensues. Wiener Boy apologizes profusely and closes shop so he can go and “assist” Buff Guy into the changing rooms. Along the way, he buys a souvenir shirt for him to change into, free of charge because he’s the one who stained his shirt in the first place. Miraculously, the changing rooms in the packed carnival by a fucking public beach is void of people, save for another pair of two hot young men just exiting from adjacent stalls (_glory hole, of course_, Eddie thinks like he just spotted a hidden easter egg), and Wiener Boy and Buff Guy enters the last fucking stall together without question because they know they’re going to fuck real hard pretty soon.

_That shirt’s too tight, let me help you take it off_, Wiener Boy says inaudibly, his eyes screaming for dick.

_You’re so good at taking care of me, bro, I want to take care of you, too._

“Asshole, you just fucking met, though?” Eddie comments but then remembers this is a half-hour crash course to anal sex so he shuts up and let nature runs its course.

They get at it pretty hot and hard so fast, banging on the cubicle walls like angry sleep-deprived customers at the pre-opening of a store on Black Friday. At one point they hear some people come in (Wow! Some sense of realism) that Buff Guy puts his fingers in Wiener Boy’s mouth to shush him, all the while biting into his shoulder to keep from moaning and he goes in slow and long to avoid slapping loudly into those soft mounds of ass, and Eddie has to admit he felt that in his groin, like how do you not get a bit warm from that even without the audio this is justifiably worthy of its 96% rating and now he understands, and the extras are gone and the boys can fuck as loudly as they want again, and goddamn why is he all sweaty in the dark in this cold empty tub anyway--

Eddie, praise his quick reflexes, shuts his laptop close just as the bathroom door opens.

For a couple of seconds, a very groggy Richie just stands there looking at him, as Eddie tries to look for cracks on the tiles in the opposite wall. He steals a glance at Richie, and the man looks like he’s on the final round of _Who Wants to Be A Millionaire?_ with all of his lifelines used up. Eddie figures that statistically, only 0.001% of people actually wake up to find their best friend tucked into a corner of a bathtub cradling their laptops.

“You allergic to light now, too?” Richie says as he switches the lights on.

“What? No, I-” Eddie stammers, cursing why defiance is his natural response to Richie. He knows that if he just said yes, Richie in this state would have bought it. “I’m studying.”

“In the bathtub?”

“Some researches claim that a change in environment can help improve brain activity.”

“In the dark?”

“Lack of other visuals helps me focus on what I’m reading.”

“Looks like someone’s acing college,” Richie says as he makes his way to the toilet to pee. Eddie’s immediate reaction is to stare back with even more intensity at the tiles, but then he realizes that being a guy and not looking neutral or comfortable at seeing another guy’s junk is just suspicious. So he does the only logical thing to do in this situation -- he turns his head and stares in the direction of Richie’s bare ass.

“Fuck, dude? Stop peeking at my wang.”

Richie reaches out to pull the shower curtain out, but Eddie quickly pulls it back in, starting an intense yet short-lived game of curtain-pulling. Exasperated, Richie twists his hips a little to the side, hiding his leaking package from view. Eddie quickly stands up, his free hand flying to the back of his head before gesturing wildly in the air.

“Hey, stop moving, or you’ll spray all over the place!” 

“Well, stop looking at Richie Junior!”

“Stop making this weird, Rich, I’ve already seen how junior it is!”

“Oh fuck you! Also ‘having seen something’ is different from deliberately looking at it!”

“How long are you going to fucking pee, anyway?!”

“I don’t have the power to decide this shit, and why is your face so red, asshole?”

“Why is _your_ face red, dickwad?”

“Everything alright in here?”

Richie and Eddie both break their intense eye contact to turn their necks and see a slightly disheveled Ben poke his head through the bathroom door, an innocent smile plastered on his face. Richie stares at him fish-eyed as he gives his hips a tiny shake before tucking himself in. Behind him, Eddie is half-climbing out of the tub, laptop tucked in his arm.

“Peachy,”’ Richie says after a beat. “To what do we owe the extreme pleasure of your visit, good Sir?”

He’s about to step out of the bathroom when Eddie yells after him, “Hey, wash your hands,” so he stops in his tracks with a slightly defiant “Okay, honey,” and makes his way to the sink.

Eddie, with his pants feeling a lot more normal after getting heated for different reasons, steps back into their bedroom, which is well, the only room apart from the bathroom in their dorm. He notices that Ben’s hair had a few leaves stuck on it.

“Jesus, did you climb up our window again instead of the door? Does anyone in our group ever do anything _normally_? Or at least has a concept of danger and consequences?”

He drops his laptop on the bed and goes up to Ben to clean him up and fix his hair, and did Ben just get a little taller again this year?

“This way’s faster than always having to fill out another guest form in your dorm,” Ben says with the sigh of someone who didn’t go to their university and always faced the inconvenience of security checks and form-filling and ID-leaving.

“Damn, since when have you been living so dangerously?” Richie says as he dries his hands with a towel hanging by a hook on the wall.

“By the way, I wanted to thank you guys for lending us this,” Ben says as he opens his large backpack and pulls out the picnic blanket he borrowed for his last date. “We had a really great time last week.”

“No worries. I just hope you washed all the _suspicious stains_ right after.”

Lips pressed into a tight-flat line, Eddie feels his face heat up in embarrassment. “Hey, have a little respect for the thing your Pop-pop knelt on when he proposed to your Nana. That blanket is like part of your origin story.”

Richie holds up the thick folded cloth in his hands as if to study it. “I dunno, I guess this old thing just makes people wanna bang.”

“Hey, uh, do you have any films from the 80’s or 90’s in there?” Ben says as he eyes the laptop, which in turn makes Eddie nervous and sweaty like a prepubescent teen just caught watching vanilla porn, which doesn’t feel too far from the actual truth.

“Bev mentioned she felt nostalgic for the films of the past decades, so,” Ben continues with a hint of a blush making its way down his neck. “Next night’s tomorrow and I want to make it special for her.”

“Aww, you’re going to invade a girl’s dormitory room in the name of love?” Richie swoons as he makes some space for the blanket in a compartment under his bed. “Why the fuck aren’t boys like you a dime a dozen?”

Ben laughs good-naturedly and all bashful-like, and Eddie instantly feels a familiar sort of affection for him the way anyone would have for their childhood friend. Also, Ben was undoubtedly the best of all of them, and there’s nothing he wouldn’t do for Beverly, either.

“Let’s see what I got here,” Eddie says as he sits down on his bed and stealthily pops his laptop open. Amazing how fast his fingers work when there’s an imminent threat of his porn being discovered. Once his browser’s clear, he opens a folder plainly named MOVIES. “Okay, what will it be for your lady?”

Ben hands over his empty flash drive as he scans the list. “Oh, here’s a classic. Can we check _Back to The Future_?”

“Sure, man,” Eddie says, and only remembers that his laptop’s audio may not be working as soon as he clicks on the file. Strangely enough, the audio seems to be working fine (which makes him do a happy little big-eyed “Eh”), except he’s definitely not hearing it on the device, but on the bluetooth speaker on his nightstand (which makes him physically stop breathing for a moment).

_ _Oh, shit. Holy fucking shit, man. Shit shit shit_ _

Even stranger is finding out that he’s capable of freezing over and burning up at the same time. This would be funny if that was an actual skill he can put on his resumé, but nothing is funny at all because not even Richie is laughing at him right now, which Eddie realizes he’s actually hoping for because Richie laughing hysterically at him is something familiar and that’s something he knows how to handle. Richie being silent about this, however -- it’s making Eddie so fucking nervous.

The badly written and poorly enacted lines of the adult film script he didn’t even hear creep up to his brain like an uninvited guest.

_I like my hotdogs long and juicy and big._

_Oh sweet Jesus on a biscuit, I didn’t mean to squeeze so hard!_

_You’re so good at taking care of me, bro, I want to take care of you, too._

_Shit_, Eddie thinks. _Motherfucking shit._

Sidenote, if he was going to stupidly expose himself, why didn’t he choose something less lame and cringe-y?

Without moving his neck, he steals a glance at Richie who is kneeling by his own bed and is taking a ridiculous amount of time stuffing the picnic blanket in its compartment. Under his crown of curls, his ears have gone a bright shade of red.

“What the fuck are you blushing for, asshole?” Eddie has the compulsion to shriek at Richie, but it feels more directed at himself that the accusation stays lodged in his throat. He’s the one feeling goddamned embarrassed here, damnit. His face is on totally on fire. _Why aren’t you laughing it off and insulting me? Shouldn’t you already have a line or two ready by now?? What the fuck are you blushing for asshole what the fuck are you blushing for asshole what the fuck are you blushing for asshole what the fuck are you_

“What are you blushing for, Eddie?” Ben asks, totally oblivious.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading! pls feel free to scream with me below


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